The Cornell Lab of Ornithology today announced the release of a new online tool for studying biodiversity and the ...

Birds are the most diverse land vertebrate on the planet, and now scientists have constructed a complete evolutionary tree of the 11,000 or so known species. This data came from hundreds of studies ...

Why do you have five fingers? Why not ten, or twenty, or one? Why do so many animals have five fingers? Five seems to be the perfect number for most hands. Oddly, the first vertebrates to come onto ...

Biologists have long drawn the animal family tree with a hazy base, unsure which creature first split from the common ...

Birds are the only dinosaur lineage that survived until today. About 66 million years ago at the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) boundary, a mass extinction event destroyed all non-avian dinosaurs, ...

The Magic Kingdom has the regal Cinderella Castle. With Epcot, it's the gleaming and futuristic Spaceship Earth. These are Disney's theme park icons, which appear in photographs and advertising so ...

Spider webs present an intriguing challenge to evolutionary biologists. These finely honed death traps come in many forms, from the trampoline-like construction of the sheet web spider, to the ...

The three-dimensional shape of a protein can be used to resolve deep, ancient evolutionary relationships in the tree of life, according to a study in Nature Communications. It is the first time ...